tonight i beg of you,

strip me naked of all pretences

let us fester in the sinews of your bed

feverish

between bated breaths and 

sticky flesh.

deliver me

and sheathe me 

so that i may rebirth a thousand excuses

for your fleeting gentleness.

suddenly, it is July,

the fields are burning.

i am ten with my mother’s dress in the palm of my hand

and she tells me i must bleed

ploughed and planted beneath the moon

i am nineteen when the blood turns sweet.

now barely twenty

kneeling, fervent

please have mercy

i claw for Judith, Salome,

but in France, Joan is burning

all grit and bones and aching limbs in heat

bound for our devotion

ablaze beneath the white sun.

we fall

where the quicksand of supple flesh,

sifts through clenched fists,

a martyr caught upon salivating tongues,

ravenous.

she is char and metal and mud

and she blisters at the touch.

this is my mother’s mother’s body;

tonight i am the seed of her longing

plucked from the riverbed

in search of something to 

sink my teeth into.

tomorrow i will dislodge, pretend to forget,

but tonight i burrow inside you,

find comfort in the rawness of this embrace

cloistered among the beads of sweat

between our writhing bodies.

i am not quite a whore, 

not quite a lover.

shrouded in drunken obscurity,

we swallow names at midnight

and spit them into the sink at dawn. ∎

Words by Jasmine Sayer. Art by Federica Pescini.